10 Wednesday May 2023
Tags
Book clubs, books, bookstores, historical fiction, history, libraries, Missouri, Ozarks, St. Louis, St. Louis World's Fair, writing
Pre-order links for my next novel, Land of Joys, are now up! Check them out here:
Am I excited? Yes! I’ve got some bookstore appearances already set up and am hoping to set up more. Also intending to get some library appearances set up too, in the near future I hope. The book is set for a September 26 release.
19 Wednesday Apr 2023
Tags
hiking, Leland Payton, Lover's Leap, Mina Sauk Falls, Missouri, Missouri State Parks, Ozarks, Taum Sauk, waterfalls
I wrote about Mina Sauk Falls a long time ago, but recently had the opportunity to revisit that beautiful landscape with my friend Randy Hyman. It was a memorable experience to hike to the falls, something I hadn’t done in perhaps three or four decades.
Although the falls are now in the state park system, part of Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, they’re still pretty hard to get to. I had forgotten just how rugged the trail down to the falls is (or perhaps it didn’t seem so rugged when I was in my twenties), But we made it down and back without incident, enjoying the immense profusion of spring wildflowers along the way.
Mina Sauk Falls is notoriously hard to photograph, first because it descends in a series of small cascades at first, before it reaches the main falls, and second because photographing the main falls from below requires you to scramble down a perilous heap of boulders to reach a vantage point from which you can see them. I didn’t make that effort, but here’s a photo by Skye Marthaler, available from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license:
Falling water draws us, whether it’s the massive flow of one of the world’s great waterfalls or a wet-weather tumble like this one. I think their appeal comes from two things. First, there’s the elemental quality, water flowing over rock. How much simpler does it get? All that force, all that power, laid out before us in a simple display of nature’s magnitude. Then there’s the timelessness of it. Watching a waterfall you sense that other people from other centuries, other millennia, have likely done the same thing. That may be why waterfalls tend to attract mythology so strongly. Leland and Crystal Payton have written an entire book, Lover’s Leap Legends, about how practically every high place in North America has generated a story about an Indian maiden leaping to her death, sometimes in mourning over her lost love and sometimes accompanied by him, and how all of these stories are essentially fictional. Mina Sauk Falls is no exception to that tendency, with an early ethnologist gently describing the existence of Mina Sauk and the origin of the fall’s name as a “romancer’s creation.”
But even if you’re not tempted to jump off the overlook, you have to admit that it offers some magnificent views. Even if you can’t see the entire waterfall in one easy sweep, you can see for miles down the valley of Taum Sauk Creek, with a glimpse of the Proffitt Mountain reservoir from a few points along the way.
12 Sunday Feb 2023
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Thanks to a recent blog post on the Iron County Historical Society’s webpage, I’ve been reading the Federal Writers’ Project’s compilation of Missouri slave narratives, available through the Library of Congress, for the last couple of days. I’ve referred to this collection before, but reading them again is always supremely worthwhile.
With all the current hullaballoo going on in the Missouri Legislature about what can and can’t be taught in our schools, I’d like to recommend that all legislators be required to read these narratives, start to finish, and then write an analytical summary about what they teach us about Missouri’s history. No cheating by making your staff do it! Frankly, I think they should be required reading in the high schools.
The Historical Society also helpfully provided a link to an excellent article on understanding and interpreting the slave narratives, written by a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Missouri-Columbia named Ashley Simpson. It’s well worth the time, too.
A more deserving set of Missouri heroes would be hard to find.
18 Tuesday Oct 2022
Tags
history, Missouri Humanities Council, speakers bureau, State Historical Society of Missouri, utopian communities
But my favorite venue is a library. Whenever I speak at a library, I always come away having learned something new myself. Library-goers are a varied and curious bunch, knowledgeable about many things, and eager to share that knowledge.
So I’m excited to rejoin the Missouri Humanities Council and State Historical Society of Missouri’s joint project, the Missouri Speakers Bureau. This project provide a wide range of speakers to libraries and other nonprofit organizations around the state: civic groups, historical societies, you name it. And if your organization is located in a rural area (defined as any county outside Jackson, Greene, Boone, or St. Louis City/County), the speakers are totally free! As a kid who grew up in small-town libraries myself, I love the experience of visiting a library and meeting new people who have a love of learning and history similar to mine.
The link to my page on the Speakers Bureau website is here. I’ve put together a presentation on Missouri utopian communities that should be interesting, and am adding new material to the presentation all the time. If you have a group that needs a speaker, get in touch!
05 Wednesday Oct 2022
Folk music fans will likely remember “The Farmer Is the Man,” the rather scathing song from the 1880s that described the plight of the farmer:
The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall;
Then they take him by the hand and they lead him from the land,
And the middle man’s the one that gets it all.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes. Today’s headline: “State lawmakers approve $40M in tax breaks for farmers.” In the story: “The measure includes tax credits to benefit companies involved in meat processing, biodiesel, ethanol fuel and urban farms. It also expands government loan programs for farmers.”
So the headline might better have read, “State lawmakers approve benefits for lenders and agribusiness corporations.” Whether actual farmers get any of those benefits is anyone’s guess. And by directing the tax breaks to certain industries, such as biodiesel and ethanol, the state is supporting a monoculture model of agriculture based on massive investment in corn acreage, intensive fertilizing and irrigation, and industrial scale of operation that turns the act of farming into something much closer to factory work.
I’ve written on this song before, but every few months or so its relevance slaps me in the face again.
30 Friday Sep 2022
Tags
books, Cornerpost Press, fiction, Missouri, Missouri Library Association, nonfiction, Scattered Lights, The Last Children of Mill Creek, Vivian Gibson, writing
The Missouri Library Association is the umbrella organization of all the libraries in Missouri – public, private, academic, and otherwise. They’re a great organization, and they speak out strongly in favor of information access and freedom of expression.
They also give out two Missouri Author Awards each year, one for fiction and one for nonfiction. This year, I was honored to have Scattered Lights win the fiction award.
Receiving this award from the MLA is extra special for me. For one thing, the books that have won it before are really terrific, and I’m honored to be in their company.
But additionally, libraries have always been special places to me, even sacred. My mom worked in the Fredericktown library, and when we moved to Annapolis, she was instrumental in establishing the Annapolis branch library, which today is named in her honor. At the dedication of the newest building that houses the Annapolis branch, my brother and sister-in-law had buttons made celebrating Mom’s commitment, and that button is what you see on my lapel. Here’s a closeup.
What she saw in libraries was their immense potential for improving people’s lives, without regard to wealth or background. When you walk into a library, you are equal to everyone else there, and the knowledge of all the planet is available to you. She loved to cultivate that curiosity. Whenever a kid came into the library, she made careful note of what that kid was interested in. And the next time that kid came in, there would be a new book pulled from the revolving collection, just waiting, to satisfy that curiosity and perhaps nudge it along a little.
A library represents the potential in us all. The existence of free public libraries is one of the great advancements of civilization. So receiving an award from the state library association is, well, pretty much the best thing I can imagine.
I’d like to comment particularly on my co-winner this year, The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson. I’ve been reading it over the past few days, and it’s a marvelous book. It’s a memoir of growing up in the Mill Creek Valley of St. Louis, a large Black district that was demolished and emptied out in the name of “urban renewal.” The story of Mill Creek is one of the tragic chapters of Missouri history, and it’s not well enough known. This memoir is beautiful and heartbreaking, and you should get a copy. Or tell your library to buy one!
10 Sunday Jul 2022
I’ve been reading the new book of poems by Dave Malone in bits and pieces over the last month. Like most books of poetry, it rewards dipping in and out.
I suppose you could say it’s not technically an “Ozarks” book, since there are sizable sections of it that are set elsewhere, when a place is specified, and many of the themes are not Ozarks-specific. But there are a lot of Ozarks poems in here, and a lot of Ozark sensibility, too. In one of my favorite poems from this collection, “Pentecostal Ladies,” he writes: “Their skirts bloom sunflowers, / a decade or two out of favor. / I wave from my front porch / though I know one day they’ll sidle up / in their ballet flats and tell me what for.” And it’s that “what for” that slaps down so delightfully true.
A few things I note about Malone’s work: first, it’s very precise. This is poet who does not just throw in the expected word. Often he leads us into a phrase then turns it ninety degrees, shifting the mood of the poem unexpectedly. The poems are best read slowly, because you never know when that turn is going to happen.
Second, Malone’s poems do two things that I don’t always see in contemporary poetry. For one thing, they are sometimes unabashedly emotional. So many contemporary poets feel restrained by some sort of unwritten rule of decorum to be clinical in their presentation of situations, but these poems don’t shy away from their feelings. But also, these poems can be funny. Sometimes the wit is verbal, sometimes situational. In either case, it’s nice to read a book in which every poem does not feel compelled to be Serious. There are plenty of serious poems in here too, poems of grief, loss, and longing. But seriousness is not the only key this instrument plays in.
Dave Malone lives in West Plains and has published a number of books of poems, each with its own tonal register (or key signature, if I want to push that musical metaphor). If you haven’t run across his work yet, I highly recommend checking it out.
03 Friday Jun 2022
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Not long ago, I had the opportunity to take a walk in one of my favorite places, the Gans Creek Wild Area in Rock Bridge State Park, just south of Columbia (sample landscape pictured above).
As usual, I quickly lost track of time. One of the great pleasures of walking in the woods is the sense of being freed from ordinary time, of entering a different kind of clock, one in which things are not measured by hours or minutes. Instead, I think of tasks to be accomplished, distances to travel. The answer to the question “How much longer do I have?” is not necessarily a half hour or forty-five minutes, but “Up a little rise, along the ridge for a half mile, and then up the last steep slope.” Float trips are similar. Time becomes, if not irrelevant, at least a secondary thing to think about.
I remember reading a book a few years ago that noted the shift that took place in the Ozarks when the economy moved from subsistence farming to manufacturing and larger farm operations. Instead of the rhythm of the seasons governing people’s lives, the clock took precedence. Many people had difficulty adjusting to the change in how life was ordered, employing various strategies of resistance against the tyranny of the clock.
Even though I’m officially “retired” from my day job, I still live a pretty ordered existence, as if an invisible timekeeper somewhere is punching me in and clocking me out. But I do love those occasions when I can stop counting time and simply live in the eternal moment.
29 Friday Apr 2022
When I was a kid, our parents would occasionally take my brother and me to what we called the “Castor River swimming hole” or alternatively, the “Castor River Shut-Ins.” Mom, as usual, fretted about our safety, while we boys just enjoyed the sweep of water through the tight passages of rock, bouncing downstream to where Dad waited to catch us.
There are a couple of swimming holes on the upper Castor, a river that receives much less attention than its more famous cousins to the west, and I honestly can’t remember which one we visited in my childhood. But one of the most unexpectedly beautiful places in the Ozarks is what is now the Amidon Memorial Conservation Area in northeast Madison County.
If you’ve visited Elephant Rocks, you know the remarkable pink granite that crops up in places across Iron, St. Francois, and Madison counties. At Amidon, that pink is lighter than at other places, far more sculpted, and shaped by the flow of water into a remarkable display.
Why doesn’t the Castor get more attention? It’s shorter, for one thing, and it quickly traverses from dramatic shut-ins to a relatively uninteresting, muddy stream, with lots of debris and agricultural runoff. But for several stretches, it’s as beautiful as anywhere in the Ozarks. Its lack of fame means that you’ll probably have the place almost to yourself, although do note that most of the ownership along the Castor is private. So you have to look for access points. The pink granite is unearthly in its strange beauty, and the flooding and debris has created a rich alluvium that lends to the growth of wildflowers in abundance.
I don’t think I’d let my kids bounce down through the shut-ins, though, unless the water was pretty low.
10 Thursday Mar 2022
Tags
Agriculture, Arkansas, books, Brooks Blevins, history, History of the Ozarks, John T. Woodruff, Missouri, Ozarks, Vance Randolph
It has already been another good year for writing from the Ozarks, and it’s only March. I have several books that I plan to write about in the coming days, but a good place to start is with this one, the third volume of Brooks Blevins’ History of the Ozarks.
Subtitled “The Ozarkers,” this volume takes us into the late 20th century, what we might call the modern history of the Ozarks. And there’s something in it for everyone.
The book opens with the legendary 1934 contretemps between Springfield businessman John T. Woodruff and folklorist Vance Randolph at the first-ever regional folk festival in the Ozarks, during which Woodruff accused Randolph and his associates of tarnishing the image of the Ozarks with their descriptions of Ozarkers as ignorant hillbillies, superstitious, barefoot moonshiners who idled away their days waiting for the next opportunity to coon hunt. The fact that Randolph’s portrayal came from actual interviews with actual Ozarkers, of course, was a difficulty to this accusation. But the conflict presages and sets the theme for the book: the divide between the modern Ozarks as perceived and the modern Ozarks as lived.
The “real” Ozarks have never been a place as simple as Dogpatch, U.S.A., and we all know that. This book shows just how complicated the history of the real Ozarks has been, with waves of immigration and internal migration, a constantly shifting economy based on the extractive industries of mining, farming, and timber, and an array of conflicting perceptions both from outside and within. So much has happened within the last century in the Ozarks that the book has to move swiftly from incident to incident and theme to theme, and sometimes I wished for it to slow down and devote more time to the things I am interested in the most; but such is the nature of historical writing. The book clocks in at about 300 pages and could easily have been three times that long, and still wouldn’t have covered everything.
One section I especially appreciated was its careful delineation of the changing agricultural economy. When I was a kid growing up in Madison and Reynolds counties, the typical farm was very much “mixed agriculture”: a pen full of hogs, a field with a few dozen cattle, a chickenhouse, maybe some row crops in the bottomland, even sometimes a specialty crop like sorghum or ducks. That model has nearly disappeared these days, replaced by farms that are strictly pasture-and-cattle or rows of giant chicken or turkey sheds (or occasionally, feeder pig operations) with the farm operator in a feudal contract with one of the big poultry juggernauts. Dairy farming has nearly disappeared. The societal impacts of these economic changes are hard to see at first, but when you consider them carefully, one obvious implication is that it becomes harder and harder to maintain a self-sufficient life in the remoter regions as farming becomes more dependent on connections to the larger industrial-agriculture machine. Thus rural counties empty out while population centers remain viable. In addition, these large operations, which seek to minimize labor costs through mechanization, rely on low-skill immigrant populations for their workers, leading to the pockets of impoverished immigrants we see in places like Noel and Aurora. The ripple effects of this demographic shift are hard to miss.
A History of the Ozarks: Volume 3 is now resting on my shelf alongside the other two volumes, but I don’t expect it to stay there long. It’s going to be taken down again and again as I re-read its accounts of Ozark historical events and refresh my understanding of the region’s rich, troubled, and treasured history.
stevewiegenstein 
